Faith Healer

Kevin and I finally got around to seeing Faith Healer last night at the Booth Theatre. We went the affordable way and bought standing room tickets - my first experience doing so. I have to say that at the Booth, standing room isn't bad at all, it's actually quite good. We made the mistake of grabbing two orchestra seats after intermission, and both being extremely tired, drifted a bit through the last two monologues of the show - so here's the best I can recount.

Faith Healer, if you don't know, is a play performed entirely in monologue form - four monologues delivered by three actors. Ralph Fiennes (one of the best actors of our time) plays Francis Hardy, the illusive title character of the show, the Faith Healer. He opens the show with the first monologue - starting by speaking what I thought was a foreign language or some sort of jibberish - but what turned out to be the names of towns in Scotland and Wales, over and over. He began to recount the times he spent travelling between these towns "performing" his gift of healing on the less fortunate in each place. Frank tells of his manager, Teddy, and wife, Grace and the experiences they've had while travelling and faith healing. Frank has a commanding presence on stage - not commanding in the sense of powerful, but mysterious and most definitely narcissitic. His confidence in himself and his gift, although recounted as shaky at times, comes forth very strong here.

As the next monologue begins, we see Cherry Jones playing Grace, Frank's wife. She appears sitting in a chair, cigarette in hand and whisky in her glass not too far off. She's crying, and appears completely lost in her own world of sorrow and confusion at what her life has become. Grace goes on to tell the audience of her travels with Frank and Teddy and how it must have felt to be the wife (usually referred to as mistress) of such a man. She explains that the couple had several failed attempts at a child, and lastly a stillborn baby as their final attempt (or did they? This remains one of the play's several unanswered questions). Grace seems tormented, but as much as she tries to share it with the audience, things seem completely bottled up inside of her own head. I, like many of the other reviews I've read, have to say that Cherry was miscast in this role. Coming from seeing her most recently in Doubt, she's much too strong of a woman to play what I see as the weak, beaten-down role of Grace. Also, please send this woman a decent dialect coach - her accent was quite terrible. However, I do love Cherry and can't wait to see what she's in next.

The third monologue belongs to Ian McDiarmid - and this man is marvelous, having recently earned a much-deserved Tony award for this role as Teddy, Frank's manager. He charms us by recounting his days as manager of several other quirky acts - his dog that plays the bagpipes, and a woman who can charm over 120 pigeons into doing whatever she asks. Teddy's stories make us laugh at the utter ridiculous of his life - seeing how happily he recounts these memories....until, he begins to talk of his days with the Faith Healer - whom he describes as "of mediocre talent at best." Teddy describes his time with Frank and Grace, and begins to lose his humor when talking of Grace's incident with losing her child. These three certainly did go through some terrible times together. Seems as if Teddy had taken quite a liking to Grace, who knows if he once was in love with her or not? Ian left the stage with thunderous applause - what a welcome monologue he had just delivered.

Ralph appears one last time as the Faith Healer and we see that this moment he is recounting is simply for the stage - he is living in the moment he is talking to us on stage. He recounts the difficulty in going back to Ireland and the events of one certain night with four Irish men and his attempt to try and perform his talents on them.

The show raises lots of questions that ultimately remained unanswered. As I left the theatre last night, I thought I had missed some of these answers, but I've come to realize that this is how the playwright, Brian Friel, has structured this piece of work. So that we ask ourselves the sort of tough life questions that can't always be answered - always searching for those answers. I think Faith Healer is a respectable piece of theatre, possibly not the most enthralling work, but certainly worth seeing three talented actors deliver monologues. Especially because we don't see this type of show performed very often at all. As I read in another review, don't be put off by not seeing these three actors on stage together - until the curtain call that is. This plays nicely on one of the major themes of the show - "that no matter how closely connected our lives are, our memories of and feelings about that shared reality are forever separate and apart."